The Cost of Web Development Services Is Influenced by Location
Researching the cost of web development services led me to an interesting Fortune Education piece from contributor Sam Becker. Using data from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS), Becker laid out the reality that web development costs are influenced by location. You are likely to pay the highest costs in Washington DC and California. You’re likely to see the lowest bill in Arkansas.
So what’s the deal? Believe it or not, cost disparities are due to nothing more than web developer income. Web development is a service rather than a product. So most of the cost is tied up in labor. And where developers make more money, costs for web development services are higher.
Web Developers Have to Make a Living
Companies offering web development services hire trained and experienced developers who know their craft well. These professionals not only deserve decent pay, but they also need to make a living. That means a company hoping to keep its web development team fully staffed needs to pay enough to allow developers to live locally. Otherwise, people cannot afford to work for them.
I ran into a similar scenario while researching nursing salaries. Nurses on the west coast and in Hawaii enjoy some of the highest salaries in the profession. But that’s partially because the cost of living in both states is sky high. Hospitals need to pay high wages. Otherwise, nurses would not be able to afford to live in either state. No nurses in the state means no nurses for state hospitals.
The same is true for web developers. According to Becker’s analysis of the data, the median salary for web developers in the U.S. is in the neighborhood of $93,000. The average base salary is just under $80,000. That’s not chump change by any means.
What Web Developers Really Do
So, what exactly do web developers do to command such high salaries? For starters, they do more than sign customers up for WordPress accounts and put up template-driven websites in under an hour. According to the experts at Webtek Digital Marketing in Salt Lake City, UT, offering web development services is a complex endeavor requiring a highly skilled workforce.
Web development services begin with aesthetic design and go from there. A developer goes into a new project with a good idea of a website’s look and feel. Then he sets about building it. In some cases, a website can be built with preprogrammed modules. In other cases, it is coded from the ground up.
Web developers are responsible for:
- Designing user interfaces.
- Creating website hierarchy.
- Streamlining navigation.
- Writing and deploying scripts.
- Maintaining high page speeds.
- Manipulating and inserting images.
- Making sure sites comply with the latest web standards.
The responsibilities listed here just barely scratch the surface. So much goes into web development that attempting to quantify it all is a fool’s errand. It goes without saying that a freelancer offering fast WordPress sites probably isn’t too deep in genuine web development services.
Worth What They Make
I am by no means a web developer. But from what I know about the career, I believe experienced developers are worth what they make. The world runs on the internet now. And the internet is powered by websites.
If I ever need to pay for web development services, I expect that the majority of what I pay will go to cover developer labor. I am okay with that. Even if it means I pay more due to my geographic location. It is just part of the cost of online success.
